I’m Back, but Still Gathering My Thoughts

By now you’ve probably heard that Hillary Clinton won big in Pennsylvania yesterday. I predicted she would come out ahead, so this time I don’t have any earthshaking words about the election. This picture of Hillary’s fantasy, which I found on Free Republic last month, says it all:

On the Republican side, John McCain made his first visit to Kentucky today. He came to Inez, a little town of 450 near the West Virginia border, so it’s deep in the heart of Appalachia. I understand he did that because this week he’s going to some of the poorest, most forgotten communities in America, and Inez is where LBJ announced his “War On Poverty,” more than forty years ago. For those who think the war in Iraq is a “quagmire,” what can you say about the War On Poverty? Are we winning this conflict, or is poverty winning?

This morning I read that not only was yesterday Earth Day, it was also Lenin’s birthday. Did the environmentalists mean to have both events on the same day? And today was called “Administrative Professionals Day.” What’s that, National Secretaries Day with a new, politically correct name?

Leive & I spent Monday evening in Gene & Rezia’s house. Considering that it’s in the same city (albeit on the other side from us), it’s amazing it took so long to visit; until now I had only been there once, and Leive hadn’t been there at all. Well, we will try to go more often in the future. It’s 13.5 miles away if you go on the quickest road, 10 miles if you cut directly through downtown.

Last night, I went with the Tuesday night men’s group of my church to see the movie “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.” There were eight of us, plus the 3-year-old son of one member. Aside from us, the theater was almost deserted, as if we had come to an after-midnight show. I never saw any patrons going to the other movies, and only a handful in ours, though it was an eight-cinema complex. Most folks must have been home watching “American Idol.” We all enjoyed the movie, and it gave us plenty to talk about afterwards. Since I knew much of the material already, what I mainly got out of it was the names of the main characters on both sides in the evolution vs. intelligent design controversy. How did they get an atheist like Professor Dawkins to admit that aliens, if not God, could have created life on earth? Ben Stein pulled off a neat trick there. It would have been more interesting, though, if he had kept in those scenes from the trailers, where’s he’s a bad boy in school.

Of course I would have rated it better than our local newspaper, which is so liberal that the only one in our family who uses the paper much is the parrot! Last Friday the paper’s critic gave the movie just one star. He wailed about Mr. Stein wanting to throw out a hundred and fifty years of scientific research, and called him a “conservative Michael Moore.” Was it Sir Francis Bacon who once said, “I know by their yelling that I have hit them right?” It looks like that happened here. I’m assuming that the Lexington paper uses the same rating system that the newspaper in Orlando used:

5 stars = See it today

4 stars = See it soon

3 stars = See it when it comes to the dollar theaters

2 stars = See it on DVD

1 star = See it in hell

Overall I’d give it three and a half stars, because it conveys its message effectively.